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Abstract
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In March 2020, when COVID-19 was acknowledged as a worldwide pandemic, many countries dedicated their efforts to mitigate the virus and its negative health outcomes. One of the most frequent solutions was forced lockdowns, which was found to be beneficial in decreasing the spread of the virus. Today, after a year of international efforts to diminish the virus, we are at a stage where we can see the impact of these measures on children during COVID-19. Specifically, we now need to reflect on what happened to the prevention of child maltreatment (CM) during this time.
There is an accumulation of knowledge with respect to the dramatic decrease of CM reports to formal systems worldwide during the COVID-19 pandemic. Moreover, researchers have been stressing that this decrease should not be attributed to an increase in the safety of children but rather due to the adverse impact of the lockdown on the system's ability to see and protect children (e.g., Baron et al., 2020; Katz & Cohen, 2020). In addition, there is growing evidence that during COVID-19, various CM risk factors significantly increased (Conrad-Hiebner & Byram, 2020; Proulx et al., 2021; Rodriguez et al., 2020; Wu & Xu, 2020), such as parental job loss (Lawson et al., 2020), parental social isolation (Lee et al., 2021), and mental health issues (Russell et al., 2020). Adding to this, parental stress was found to be a major CM risk factor that increased during COVID-19 and an increase in self-reported child abuse was found for parents experiencing heightened stressors (Lawson et al., 2020).
It is important to note that alongside the worrisome decrease in CM reports and a significant increase in risk factors for CM, several studies have illustrated an increase in children's display of stress (Jiao et al., 2020), their reports on experienced violence to helplines (Petrowski et al., 2020) as well as an increase in children's physical injuries referred to hospital emergency units (Kovler et al., 2020).
The initial data from the past year of the pandemic raises a discussion regarding the regression of prevention efforts during this time. We argue that COVID-19 reverted any progress of prevention efforts. Furthermore, during the pandemic, most of the various systems' resources and responses were dedicated solely to the traditional child protective model of CM, meaning its identification and investigation...
Language: en |